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ISPs ,even here, often and more often lie about the internet capacity. They sell some poor guy 50mbit internet for big bucks knowing his line will only provide 30mbits, because they said in the contract up to 50mbit

This should be treated as criminal fraud in my opinion.

I mean in obvious cases, not when the actual speed is 5% slower than promised.

Oh yeah, that does piss me off to no end. When I was trying to get internet connection in my current apartment, I found a really sweet looking deal. So I called to the ISP to see whether there's something wrong with the offer... Well guess what, after a while I found out they would only be able to provide half the advertised speed, for the same price. Grr.

DukeNukemForever: I know Günter Knieps work, but I have to disagree here. Offering your own services without a limitation but heavily limiting others is privileging your own data. Technically you can maybe distinguish between internet and intranet, of course, but for the customers it's relevant what services and data they can access through their last mile, and here telekoms own network services, labeled as intranet, are still another internet services.

OneFiercePuppy: And this is why I say you are in good company. Your intuitive understanding makes sense, whereas the actual implementation often does not. If the laws were changed to make intuitive sense, though, I fear there could never be much real neutrality. Or, if there were, plans would all have to be pay-per-data-volume, which would benefit me, for example, but likely not many other users.

That or allow all telecom infrastructure worldwide to be state-controlled and maintained so that a tarriff approaching zero could be implemented with infrastructure costs recouped through taxes, but that too may be impossible.

A law is not complete deductive, it always allows the interpretation from the legislative to follow the main goal of it. If the legislative believe the goal of a law is to avoid discriminating or privileging services by the providers, it's not relevant if you technically correctly differentiate between intranet and internet, it's the freedom of the legislative here to decide what internet means within the meaning of the law.

Technically you're right if you say it's intranet and not the internet, I absolutely get your point , but from the legal point it's up to the legislative to decide if Telekom is harming competition in general and other service provider here by favoring their own data on the last mile, and that would be against the main goal of net neutrality.

Btw: Telekom differs also between connection speed. For most customers (1 to 16Mbit/s) it's 75GB of traffic limit.

Edit: Sorry for heavily editing again, but unfortunately my english isn't good enough to get the right wording in the first place.

jamyskis: Mathematically, yes, but show me a line that actually supplies the promised downstream speed.

keeveek: Which is one of my other concerns - lying to the customers.

ISPs ,even here, often and more often lie about the internet capacity. They sell some poor guy 50mbit internet for big bucks knowing his line will only provide 30mbits, because they said in the contract up to 50mbit

This should be treated as criminal fraud in my opinion.

I mean in obvious cases, not when the actual speed is 5% slower than promised.

Caveat emptor =(

DukeNukemForever: Edit: Sorry for heavily editing again, but unfortunately my english isn't good enough to get the right wording in the first place.

Well, my German is pretty terrible. I'm grateful we can do this in a language I can handle. Otherwise I'd just Babelfish my points (Google Translate is too good) and dance away laughing, knowing that your brain would explode from trying to read Babelfish translations.

At least in Poland, they can't sell you shit and tell it's gold. In most civil law countries caveat emptor is severily limited. I see practice like this as a fraud. Because when they sell you 50mbit net connection when they know line capacity is max 20, they could as well sell you "up to 10000PB net connection" and it would be just as true.

Thankfully, in civilized countries customer protection is not just a phrase.

keeveek: At least in Poland, they can't sell you shit and tell it's gold. In most civil law countries caveat emptor is severily limited. I see practice like this as a fraud. Because when they sell you 50mbit net connection when they know line capacity is max 20, they could as well sell you "up to 10000PB net connection" and it would be just as true.

Thankfully, in civilized countries customer protection is not just a phrase.

Practice often used by Orange on villages - they are selling 'up to 10mbits', knowing the line will not handle more than 1-2mb.

ISPs ,even here, often and more often lie about the internet capacity. They sell some poor guy 50mbit internet for big bucks knowing his line will only provide 30mbits, because they said in the contract up to 50mbit

This should be treated as criminal fraud in my opinion.

I mean in obvious cases, not when the actual speed is 5% slower than promised.

The concern is more that they present it in marketing as customers actually getting 50mbit on a 50mbit line. That's obviously bullshit, but practical concerns do usually prevent a line from reaching full speed. Legally speaking, they actually have provided you with a 50mbit line, but environmental factors prevent you from actually exploiting this speed. As a rule, if you've got full speed on a broadband connection, you're actually being throttled by your ISP, because chances are, the line is capable of more.

The best analogy for an internet connection is a contract for a taxi trip from A to B. The marketing promises you that you will be there in exactly an hour, but the small print states that it may be give or take a few minutes, depending on traffic conditions, roadworks, technical problems and so on and so forth.

That's the nature of the internet. It's never possible to tell precisely how fast X household's internet connection will be until the damn thing is actually connected, because it's dependent on how many other subscriber lines there are, how far the subscriber is from the DSL multiplexer, how many people are using that copper/fibre op line at any one time etc.

But yeah, I do agree that there should be an guaranteed minimum on available bandwidth. The telecoms are at least capable of using empirical data to estimate what a user will get in a given area.

My bet was that the pirate or the green party will first jump on that topic, but no, it's the SPD. The SPD wants that net neutrality should be legally implemented by the government, because leaving the security of net neutrality to the market is not good, the actual behaviour massively harms net neutrality. God praise the election campaign ;-)

OneFiercePuppy: Well, my German is pretty terrible. I'm grateful we can do this in a language I can handle. Otherwise I'd just Babelfish my points (Google Translate is too good) and dance away laughing, knowing that your brain would explode from trying to read Babelfish translations.

Oh, don't worry, my head is already exploding while translating my german minds into some understandable english ;-)

keeveek: At least in Poland, they can't sell you shit and tell it's gold. In most civil law countries caveat emptor is severily limited. I see practice like this as a fraud. Because when they sell you 50mbit net connection when they know line capacity is max 20, they could as well sell you "up to 10000PB net connection" and it would be just as true.

Thankfully, in civilized countries customer protection is not just a phrase.

Szulak: Practice often used by Orange on villages - they are selling 'up to 10mbits', knowing the line will not handle more than 1-2mb.

my parents had that but they were clear about the speed limitations. Because their house is fairly far away from main connections which were not upgraded i think in ten years they were clear about the speed. No deception here.

australia had years ago huge 5GB limit for only 39.99. First time I heard that on TV I was seriously confused. Was that per day limit. still 150GB per month does not sound as huge? took me few rereads of article about the limit to actually comprehend that they yes, mean download and upload limit of 5GB per month at 512 kb/s then throttled to 56 kb/s

they got smarter since then and with introduction of National Broadband Network, and dozen smaller ISP limits are either very high (500GB) or truly unlimited for regular price anyone working can afford.

in cities.

if you live in waga waga you are probably fucked (and if you live on a farm somewhere far then you are even worse off)

The problem is not the limit but competition. ISPs can set whatever limits they want in my opinion as long as there is strong competition... as long as you always have three or more different isp to choose from the download limits will not survive the market. But if there is one ISP like in USA then it is an issue.

Szulak: Practice often used by Orange on villages - they are selling 'up to 10mbits', knowing the line will not handle more than 1-2mb.

I see. Something like: "When we say the line gets 10Mbps, we meant it gets up to 10Mbps. And when we say it gets up to 10Mbps, we mean it can get up to 10Mbps. And when we say can we mean it actually can't."

BlueMooner: Wow, I didn't know. I thought that Europe was much more egalitarian and liberal regarding media and arts than here in the US. I've seen several games over the years that had a full release in Europe but a censored release here.

Including Gothic.

There are only a handful of games that are banned here in Germany. Most of those games, people think are banned (like Doom until recently), are actually just on the Index, which means, that distributing them is still possible, although heavily restricted. Most publishers, try to circumvent this by censoring their games, thereby either getting a lower rating or even a rating at all. However, there is no law stating that the publishers have to do this.

Wikipedia has two pretty accurate articles on how the indexing process works and under what circumstances games actually can get banned. They are certainly worth a read, if you want to know more about it.

Gaunathor: There are only a handful of games that are banned here in Germany. Most of those games, people think are banned (like Doom until recently), are actually just on the Index, which means, that distributing them is still possible, although heavily restricted. Most publishers, try to circumvent this by censoring their games, thereby either getting a lower rating or even a rating at all. However, there is no law stating that the publishers have to do this.

Wikipedia has two pretty accurate articles on how the indexing process works and under what circumstances games actually can get banned. They are certainly worth a read, if you want to know more about it.

It's those restrictions that cause comparisons with Iran, China and Russia to be drawn, along with the seemingly arbitrary nature of the indexing (I usually translate it as blacklisting) and the massive potential for abuse in the wording of the law.

Not to mention that we've teetered a little too close to the edge of Chinese-style internet censorship in recent history, partly on the basis of the very same Youth Protection legisation.